The internet is kind of like drinking water, says UC Berkeley Professor Nicole Starosielski. Most of us don’t think much about how it’s delivered to our houses or wherever we need it, until we can’t get it.
The internet is kind of like drinking water, says UC Berkeley Professor Nicole Starosielski. Most of us don’t think much about how it’s delivered to our houses or wherever we need it, until we can’t get it.
But Starosielski, who joined the UC Berkeley Department of Film and Media in the fall, thinks about it all the time. And she’s made it a priority to help people learn about and visualize the internet—a communication system that has become essential to our everyday lives.
Unlike drinking water, she says, „the internet transforms our experience of space and time. So many people depend on it, and we need to know about how it works.“
Berkeley News talked with Starosielski about how the backbone of the global internet is made up of close to a million miles of telecommunication cables laying on the bottom of the ocean and why we need the arts and humanities to make visible this invisible infrastructure.I have to admit, I didn’t know about undersea fiber-optic cables until I was preparing for this interview. Can you first explain what they are?
Most people don’t know about undersea fiber-optic cables, so you would be totally forgiven for not knowing about them—until right now.
It’s really counterintuitive, if you think of all our interfaces with the internet. A lot of them are wireless. Your phones are mobile. Your headphones are mobile. Your laptop is mobile. So why would the core of the internet be fixed in these tiny little tubes on the bottom of the ocean? It doesn’t make any sense when you look at the rest of the internet’s infrastructure.
Turns out only that last mile, only that last hop to your home, to your laptop, is wireless. Almost all the rest of the infrastructure is encased in cables and in buildings. And those cables go underground and under the ocean. And they transport 99% of transoceanic and international telecommunications traffic—data traffic, internet traffic.Can you briefly explain the history of the subsea cable network? When did these telecommunication cables first get put into the ocean?
It’s a long history, but in a nutshell, there were three eras. Telegraphs were first. This started in the 19th century and telegraph lines were being laid on land. The companies laying telegraphs wanted to lay these cables across bodies of water, so they developed telegraphs that went underwater. They were used to send all sorts of messages—personal communications, but also news and information about trade and stock markets. So telegraph systems were laid all over the world. A lot of the British Empire was networked and this was definitely a colonial technology.
Radio came along, but the telegraph remained important because it was more secure. Radio didn’t replace the telegraph, but emerged alongside it.
Then telephone systems were developed. And telephone cables essentially replaced the telegraph system. Those were laid across the oceans from the 1950s to ’80s. Satellites were developed, but they didn’t replace cables.
Then from the 1980s through today, we have fiber-optic cables, made of some of the same materials, being encased in plastic and having copper conductors inside. But at the heart of these cables are thin strands of glass—that’s the fiber-optic part of the cable. And that’s what transports all of our internet traffic today.How were and are their routes determined?
If you look at the parts of cable networks globally, you’ll see that they largely got layered onto major transportation routes and major traffic routes. The endpoint, historically, has always been population centers.
When you look at historical maps of telegraph cables, they often traversed British colonial routes, then U.S. imperial routes. They tracked with the interests of the states, whom companies were affiliated with, if not owned by. There are few cables, for example, between Africa and the U.S., Africa and South America.
Historical forms of power and relationships manifested in transportation routes. Transportation routes solidified those forms of power. Cables are sedimented in those historical routes. That’s true globally. And while historically cables have been conduits that go between population centers, they are now extending between data centers.
So the cable geography is shifting because they’re transmitting between places where data is stored rather than just between consumers. Although they’re still extending between consumers, as well. But this historical layering is important.Where are the main hubs in the world for the data centers today?
Data centers are concentrated in the United States, but also in Europe and China. In the past, there were no cables laid in the central East Coast of the United States. East Coast cables went to New York, they went to Miami, but you didn’t see cables landing in Georgia or Virginia. That has changed, because now Virginia is the hub of data centers globally. A huge amount of traffic transits through Ashburn, Virginia, so now they are laying cables directly to Virginia.
Another case is Ireland. For many years, cables have landed in Ireland. The telegraph landing in Ireland was extraordinarily important for transatlantic communications. But recently, Ireland has started to develop a lot of data centers, and this is possible because they already had cables.
These cables are not going to Virginia to serve the population of Washington, D.C. They’re going for the data centers. Same with Ireland. So there has been a shift. These large facilities, where all the internet’s content is stored, are having a sort of gravitational effect on the internet’s structure.
